What Comes Second: The Lesson of the Barclays Center

As you walk east along Atlantic Avenue, the new Barclays Center appears first as a dark shape on the horizon. Off center, a wrapped package with a mysterious silhouette. Coming closer, the foreground reveals itself as a long, paved triangle, an on-ramp to the steep planted wedge that forms the roof of the renamed Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center subway station. The roof of the arena dips down in welcome, its brow displaying the brand-new Barclays Center signs in Carolina blue, their color and serifed font making an uneasy contrast with the arena’s red-brown weathering-steel wrapper. The wrapper was designed by SHoP Architects, and the tough mesh speaks of the industrial past and the digital present, an image reinforced by the pulsing screens lining the cut-out entrance canopy. The Barclays logo speaks only of corporate branding, without a lilt. Given the bank’s recent scandals, it may be helpful that the signage can be switched out.

The arena itself cannot be switched out. After nine contentious years, it is here. My first reaction, standing opposite on the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic Avenues is: it is big. Much bigger than I expected. The only arena that I am familiar with as a pedestrian is Madison Square Garden, a circular box in a forest of surrounding towers. You never see the bulk of it plain. On television, the cameras shoot arenas from above, turning surrounding parking lots into wallpaper, and emphasizing the shape and edge. But here there’s nothing to obscure, soften, or relate to the arena, which occupies more than a city block. The width of the surrounding streets allows the Barclays Center to stand in relief as the alien presence it is. The architect Gregg Pasquarelli recently described the arena to the New York Times as what might happen if “Richard Serra and Chanel created a U.F.O. together.”

My second reaction was dismay. I do not think the arena’s architecture should relate better to the context. The immediate context is the developer Forest City Ratner’s two cheaply clad, faux-historicist malls across Atlantic Avenue. The larger context is the lowrise brownstone neighborhoods of Fort Greene and Prospect Heights. To relate to the first would be depressing; to relate to the second, impossible. The real building is an exact analogue to the renderings of this site, which, like so many other renderings, blur and dematerialize the neighbors. All you can see is the Barclays Center, because it is big, because it is dark, because it is without scale. The subway entrance, a potentially quotidian and relateable moment, is veiled by a ski-ramp roof. There is a cove of wooden benches in front of it, then more gray pavers leading you under the oculus to the front door. Right now, tended by lifts, the entrance suggests space portal more than porte-cochère.

What the Barclays Center does is create a whole new context. A bolder, gutsier, lunar context that suggests not that the arena is too big, but that the neighborhood is too small. What would make the arena fit is towers—towers like the sixteen buildings approved, over a twenty-five-year period, for the eastern stretch of the site. Do I want those towers to be built now, just to make the arena work?

The arena was always a Trojan horse: its stars (Jay-Z), its original starchitect (Frank Gehry), and its semi-public function (bringing pro basketball to Brooklyn) have been used to make the development of the Vanderbilt rail yard seem like a reward rather than an imposition. In 2009, Gehry left the project, adding his arena and tower designs to the long list of New York’s famous unrealized buildings. SHoP’s façade is the aesthetic opposite of Gehry’s shiny petals, but it has the same disruptive potential. If what comes first is a designer U.F.O., what comes second rises to meet the strangeness. What is built on the rest of the rail yards is highly unlikely to come back down to the height of a brownstone cornice. How different the future of this corner might have been if the development had started instead with housing or even with the planned public park.

It sounds ridiculous, but for a version of this alternate history, look at the other end of Atlantic Avenue where, ten years after they were first marked on the map, two private residential towers have failed to materialize at the southern entrance to Brooklyn Bridge Park. The mandate for Brooklyn Bridge Park, a 1.3-mile long work-in-progress on five former Port Authority piers, states that it must be “self-sustaining,” generating its own operations and maintenance funds. When Regina Myer became president of the Brooklyn Bridge Park Development Corporation, in 2008, she made it a priority to get park construction started. The first two sections of the park opened in 2010: Pier One, a landscaped artificial hill with paths, a promenade, and a stunning view of lower Manhattan, and Pier Six, a nested set of kids’ playgrounds and beach volleyball. This summer, a developer and architect were chosen for the park’s other major development site, at the well-touristed Fulton Ferry Landing. The resulting, ten-story zig-zagging hotel and residential building, designed by Rogers Marvel Architects for Toll Brothers and Starwood Capital, does everything in its power to defer to the park.

We will never know what a development for Brooklyn Bridge Park designed without the cues of Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates’ landscape might have looked like. The Rogers Marvel building echoes the park’s simplified use of stone and steel. It steps down to meet the green lawns with planted roofs. Pedestrian pathways through the structure ensure it will not be a barrier to public access, and the line between the park and the building’s private spaces is a berm rather than a wall. Because the park came first, the architects let the park lead, making their building more parklike, letting architecture defer to landscape. Because the park came first, there was no question that Pier One was public, that the hotel guests and apartment owners would have to share, and that the building could serve as an improved link between the still-industrial Furman Street and the open space.

The development of Governors Island may play out in a parallel manner. When the Coast Guard originally sold the island to the city of New York for a dollar, commercial ideas dominated the dialogue: casinos, biotech centers, fairgrounds. But the response to an early request for development proposals was inconclusive, and the island’s operating corporation decided to open the island to visitors each summer, moving ahead first with building a fan base, then with an open-space competition, and now with the construction of that new landscape, all without a hotel, university, or museum in place. People didn’t know what to do with an island in New York Harbor until they got to experience it. By choosing Dutch landscape architects West 8, the Trust for Governors Island hopes to enhance the vacation-like flavor of the trip. After six summers of frequent visits, I can see Governors Island as an ideal location for an urban farm and restaurant, along the line of Blue Hill at Stone Barns. Or a floating hostel. Or a pan-university conference center. The future is suggested by what came first.

The critique of these analogies is obvious: these are public lands, these are parks. But they are not parks without buildings, or parks without (one must assume) future profits. The M.T.A. rail yard was once public, too, and the lack of compelling visual alternatives—public or private—to the Gehry renderings was always a problem for the opposition.

At the corner of Atlantic and Flatbush, the arena is a powerful suggestion, a building block. One that now seems so big, but may eventually be dwarfed. Its size and scalelessness, its aggressive form and color, its otherworldliness, condition the rest of the development site for more of the same. It is lazy to take the position that there’s nothing more to do here than play ball. There will be no unbuilding, but there can be lessons learned from the Barclays Center about urban planning. It is not only zoning and liquor licenses, or community-benefits agreements and affordable-housing set-asides, or parking and traffic that need to determine new developments. It’s the order of buildings. What comes first irrevocably changes what follows.

Image: Building rendering courtesy SHoP Architects.

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